How do you know if your tone of voice is connecting with your audience?

Tone of voice is not just what you say, but how you say it. It's the personality and emotion that you convey through your words, style, and tone. It's a crucial part of your brand identity and how you connect with your audience. But how do you know if your tone of voice is working for you or against you? How do you measure its impact and effectiveness? In this article, you'll learn some practical tips and tools to help you assess and improve your tone of voice.

1 Define your tone of voice

Before you can evaluate your tone of voice, you need to have a clear idea of what it is and what it stands for. Your tone of voice should reflect your brand values, goals, and audience. It should be consistent across all your channels and platforms, from your website to your social media posts. To define your tone of voice, you can use a simple framework like the 4 dimensions of tone of voice: formality, emotion, humor, and respect. For each dimension, choose a word or phrase that describes how you want to sound, and use it as a guide for your writing.

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Laura Leiva

Freelance Copywriter + Journalist | Bold Copy for Modern Brands | Content Strategy + Writing, Brand Messaging, and Email Marketing for Beauty, Wellness, Hospitality, Lifestyle, SaaS, Retail, and eCommerce Brands.
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I've found it helpful to do a couple of things: - See where your customers spend time online and use that to guide how formal the brand's voice is. If they hang out on TikTok, it's going to be much more casual than if you're trying to reach them on LinkedIn. Overall, be authentic no matter what because that's what's going to build trust between your brand and customers. - I like to see what ideal customers are saying [through direct feedback, reviews, or on social platforms] and use that language in the content or copy. It helps you hone in on pain points or benefits and speak to those thoughts directly.

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Kristine D.
(edited)
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I'm with Laura. I can see what customers are interested in and what they are up to. They're more engaged in those entertainment things compared to people who are selling. So the question for every marketer is, how can we get them involved in social media posts that helps in building relationships?

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2 Analyze your existing content

Once you have your tone of voice defined, you can start analyzing your existing content to see how well it matches your expectations. To do this, you can read your content aloud and listen to how it sounds. Does it sound natural, engaging, and authentic? Does it match your brand personality and voice? Additionally, you can use a readability tool like Hemingway or Readable to check for clarity, simplicity, and readability. Does your content use simple words, short sentences, and active voice? Is jargon, clichés, and passive voice avoided? You can also use a tone analyzer tool like IBM Watson or Toneapi to check for emotional tone, sentiment, and personality. Does your content convey the right emotions like excitement, trust, or empathy? Does it match your audience's preferences and expectations? With these tools and methods in mind, you can ensure that your content is up to par with the tone of voice you have defined.

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Laura Leiva

Freelance Copywriter + Journalist | Bold Copy for Modern Brands | Content Strategy + Writing, Brand Messaging, and Email Marketing for Beauty, Wellness, Hospitality, Lifestyle, SaaS, Retail, and eCommerce Brands.
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Take a look at existing content to see if it matches up with current brand goals. Some of the early blog posts on my website sound cringeworthy, but they highlight my growth as a writer. The same can be said for brands finding confidence in writing content as the business grows. Reading content out loud is also helpful - how does it sound? If it's too convoluted or complicated, you risk losing the reader.

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3 Collect feedback from your audience

Gaining insight into whether your tone of voice resonates with your audience can be done by asking them directly. Surveys, polls, comments, reviews, and testimonials on your website, email, and social media are all useful methods to collect feedback. You can also use metrics and data from your content performance to measure its success – such as traffic, engagement, conversions, and retention. This will help you determine if your content is attractive and inspiring action, loyalty, leads and sales.

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4 Test and optimize your tone of voice

Testing and optimizing your tone of voice is essential for achieving desired results and goals. You can utilize A/B tests or split tests to create two versions of content with different tones of voice, and then compare their performance. Additionally, a style guide or checklist is beneficial for ensuring consistency and quality. Experimenting with different tones of voice and formats can help you determine which works best for your audience. Tools like Optimizely, Grammarly, ProWritingAid, Lumen5, and Canva can be used to run tests, check content, and create content.

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Sutrisno Sahala Parasian Panjaitan

Data Driven Social Media Marketing Specialist | Empowering Brands through Strategic Insights
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The best way is by testing and evaluation until we find the best working formulas. We need to be objective with the metrics and come up with the strategy based on it.

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5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?

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How do you know if your tone of voice is connecting with your audience?

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1 Define your tone of voice

2 Analyze your existing content

3 Collect feedback from your audience

4 Test and optimize your tone of voice

5 Here’s what else to consider

Digital Copywriting

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